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Textures, Materials and Shaders

Overview and introduction

This is the landing page for materials in Cyberpunk 2077. It contains a definition and a rough overview.

Check the section's sub pages in the wiki's navigation tree for more detailed information about the different kinds of materials. Additional material-related information can be found here:

General information

Handy list of references: Cheat sheet: Materials
Re-using materials as templates: Re-using materials: .mi
How it works in the example: https://github.com/CDPR-Modding-Documentation/Cyberpunk-Modding-Docs/blob/main/for-mod-creators/files-and-what-they-do/3d-objects-.mesh-files

Multilayered

General information: Multilayered: Cyberpunk's supershader
Properties and definition: Multilayered Material: Properties
Preview images: Multilayered: Previews

Hands-on:

Definition: Shader

In its original state, a https://github.com/CDPR-Modding-Documentation/Cyberpunk-Modding-Docs/blob/main/for-mod-creators/files-and-what-they-do/3d-objects-.mesh-files is a collection of vertices (pixels). The space between those vertices is filled by faces, which form the 3d object's surface.

The shader is the thing that goes on top of the surface, rendering a material such as glass, skin, concrete, steel…

Without a shader, objects would be invisible in the game, the surface simply being transparent. In Cyberpunk, a default shader will be assigned in such cases (such as debug_coloring.mt).

In Cyberpunk 2077, REDEngine shaders are implemented as .mt/.remt files.

How can I use shaders?

If you have ever messed with an item's materials, then you already have.

To use a shader, you create a Material Instance, where you can configure the parameters. Not every parameter of a shader can be configured: since skin always has subsurface scattering, it makes no sense to tweak this. But since skin color already varies dramatically if you don't throw exotic chrome into the mix, you can change them easily via tint.

Definition: Material

For details how materials are used on a mesh, see the https://github.com/CDPR-Modding-Documentation/Cyberpunk-Modding-Docs/blob/main/for-mod-creators/files-and-what-they-do/3d-objects-.mesh-files, or learn how materials can be defined in a mesh via https://github.com/CDPR-Modding-Documentation/Cyberpunk-Modding-Docs/blob/main/for-mod-creators/files-and-what-they-do/3d-objects-.mesh-files#materialinstance-the-local-material or loaded externally from

In the context of Cyberpunk, a material is the thing that lets the shader define the surface properties of a https://github.com/CDPR-Modding-Documentation/Cyberpunk-Modding-Docs/blob/main/for-mod-creators/files-and-what-they-do/3d-objects-.mesh-files. Typically, you create a local instance, which will then pull in a shader via baseMaterial.

The property baseMaterial can point at a .mt / .remt file directly, or to an intermediary .mi file:

The .mi file

Each part of a mesh (submesh) can have a different material assigned.

Do you want to know more? ( =>https://github.com/CDPR-Modding-Documentation/Cyberpunk-Modding-Docs/blob/main/for-mod-creators/files-and-what-they-do/3d-objects-.mesh-files#chunkmaterials)

For a hands-on guide and something to play around/experiment with, check AMM: Textured items and Cyberpunk Materials using Custom Props.

What kinds of material exist?

Textured

If you have modded other games, you're used to PBR materials with a bunch of textures like diffuse, normal, metalness etc.

See Cheat sheet: Materials -> #pbr-material for a list.

To change a textured material, see Changing materials, colors and textures -> #step-2-finding-the-correct-appearance

Did you know? You can make Cyberpunk's default textured material glow.

Multilayered

This is specific to Cyberpunk, and it is incredibly cool. If you're used to textured materials, you're probably going to hate it at first, but it has incredible versatility and re-usability.

What is a multilayered material and how does Multilayered: Cyberpunk's supershader work?
What are these properties, how do I use them?
Changing the colours
Changing the mask

Decal

A decal material is applied to a decal (sub)mesh, which is located on the surface of another mesh like a sticker.

Check out our guide on Adding decals for further explanation and detail.

Emissive

There are various kinds of emissive materials. See Cheat sheet: Materials -> #emissive-materials for a list.

Material wireframes

You can make materials display as wireframes of their geometry by changing the following property in their .mt.

Please do not overwrite original .mt files, as this will effect everything in the entire game. Always create your own local copy!

Textures

What kinds of textures exist, and what do they do?

This page aims to give an overview on different kinds of textures and what the game is using them for.

If you just want to make textures and don't care for the theory, you can find the guides under Modding Guides -> Textures and LUTs

By default, all textures in Cyberpunk2077 are Y-flipped (upside down). WolvenKit will take care of that for you during import/export via the VFlip property.

If you just want to know how to import/export textures, see here.

Types of files

Diffuse/Albedo

This texture is directly projected onto a mesh to give it colour and appearance. Used by shaders like metal_base.remt.

Naming convention:

In the game files, these files will be named <name>_d.xbm (e.g. base\environment\decoration\food\packaged_food\textures\synthetic_snack_01_d.xbm)

When importing a diffuse texture with a non-default file name, make sure to check the isGamma box in the import properties.

Normal

Also known as "bump map", this texture is used to give a mesh depth and surface details. Used by shaders like metal_base.remt.

Naming convention:

In the game files, these files will be named <name>_n.xbm (e.g. base\environment\decoration\food\packaged_food\textures\synthetic_snack_01_n.xbm)

For a guide how to make your own normal maps, see here.

Roughness

Also known as "gloss map", this texture defines how light scatters across the surface of your 3d model. Used by shaders like metal_base.remt.

White => very rough
Black => very smooth

For an overview image, see Roughness/Metalness overview.

Naming convention:

In the game files, these files will be named <name>_r.xbm (e.g. base\environment\decoration\food\packaged_food\textures\synthetic_snack_01_r.xbm)

Metalness

Also known as "metallic map", this texture defines which parts of the material behave like metal and which parts don't. Used by shaders like metal_base.remt.

White => metal
Black => not metal

For an overview image, see Roughness/Metalness overview.

Naming convention:

In the game files, these files will be named <name>_m.xbm (e.g. base\envment\decoration\food\packaged_food\textures\synthetic_snack_01_m.xbm)

Atlas

Used for in-game items and UI elements, these textures contain a collection of images. They are made available to the game via inkatlas files.

Naming convention:

In the game files, these files will be named atlas_<name>.xbm (e.g. base\gameplay\gui\fullscreen\hacking_minigame\atlas_minigame_programs.xbm)

Additional intel

Roughness/Metalness overview

Shaders

RED4 shaders (mt)

What are shaders?

Every visual asset in REDengine uses a specific shader, designated by REDengine as MT (.mt) files. Even meshes "without a shader" are in-fact using a debug shader such as debug_coloring.mt. Shaders are the most basic expression of a surface, ranging from glass, skin, concrete, and steel. Each shader contains a combination of constant hidden-variables, and exposed variables for artists to tweak. For example, all skin exhibits some similar properties such as subsurface scattering so there is no reason to expose this; artists cannot use the skin shader without subsurface scattering. However skin color can vary dramatically, so these parameters are exposed to the artists using textures or color parameters. Artists are able to create "instances" of shaders called Material Instances, which contain localized variations of the textures and properties exposed by the base shader.

For an overview of the most common shaders and their use cases, see Cheat sheet: Materials

What are materials?

Materials are a specific instance of a shader, to be used on a mesh or subset of meshes. Materials are contained inside mi (material instance) files or within mesh files themselves as a CMaterialInstance chunk. While internal material instance chunks can be handy to have inside the mesh, external mi files can be used for multiple meshes. It's important to remember that materials are simply instances of shaders. The variables contained within the material only take effect when those same variables are present inside the base shader. For example, if RoughnessTexture is not present within the base shader adding this property to a material instance will have absolutely no effect.

The Daisy Chain

Meshes rarely use shaders directly, but instead rely on any number of .mi files (check the player's skin materials for an example, or check Re-using materials: .mi ->#why-do-i-need-this).

If the baseMaterial path ends in .mi, you're looking at a daisy chain.

This approach lets you bundle shared properties. If you have 30 materials with 4 properties and 3 of them never change, then it's the perfect time for a .mi file.

Daisy-chaining those together lets you define and refine templates. For example, every human has skin, and all skin has veins and blood vessels — but the player, your average Maelstrom gangoon and bog-standard vanilla NPCs are not using the same textures. And that is before skin colours come in.

How does the daisy chain work?

Think of them as photoshop layers, applied in reverse order: the first one that's loaded is the shader itself with its default properties, then each .mi in the chain gets applied on top of that.

Properties in the mesh will be applied last, and will thus overwrite anything from the chain.

The closer to the mesh, the more override!

Shader Docs

This section gives you an overview of shaders and their properties. For a detailed explanation, see Material properties.

Understanding and leveraging RED4 shaders

We do not have official documentation from CDPR about how shaders are used by artists. Thus any 2d/3d artist is looking at hundreds of black-box shaders with unknown usage. This is extremely demotivating for anyone looking to bring new assets to life with REDengine. The following list of tables is an attempt to make life easier for artists by using the community to document commonly used shaders.

About the documentation

The name and path of each shader will be documented by the header.
Next we are using a table for each texture parameter with the exact name listed by CDPR in the w2mg file, how REDengine uses each specific RGBA channel, and the usable range of the channel if not 0-1/0-255.
When applicable, vertex color properties will be listed underneath the texture table with a similar format.
Scalar, vector, color, and other properties will follow with their own unique description table.
An asterisk (*) is used to notate some degree of uncertainty, or need for more independent testing.

Shaders

skin

The skin material is a versatile PBR (textured) shader.

base/materials/skin.mt

You can learn more about the skin shader under Material properties-> Hair and skin material properties.

While it is possible to use the skin shader for things that are not skin, you should consider using metal_base instead.

Notes

The DetailNormal texture contains generic normal details that are shared between most faces. This is not a tiling/procedural texture. The DetailNormalInfluence scalar parameter can be used to lower the intensity to simulate makeup or synthetic skin.\
The MicroDetail texture contains a microblend tiling texture used to add procedural detail to the normal map. We believe the Roughness texture blue channel is used to mask parts of the face from exhibiting this detail, such as the lips, eyelids, and ears.

`mesh_decal`

base/materials/mesh_decal.mt

Notes

DiffuseColor multiplies against the texture color to add procedural color

glass

There are many different other glass shaders. This is the most basic one, used for small objects:

base\materials\glass.mt

To see different glass materials and their configurations, check Material properties -> Transparent material properties.

television_ad

base\fx\shaders\television_ad.mt

Note

AdTexture: TV screen will play looping animations that are actually sprites like a .gif. We believe this is for optimization purposes since videos are heavy.
TilesWidth, TilesHeight, and PixelsHeight combine will help the game define the dimension of your tile (sprite) on the sprite sheet.
You should calculate your sprite sheet dimension so it completely fits in a square sheet. For example, a simple dimension is 5x5 tiles with 300x300 pixel sprite. Such a dimension will produce animation with 25 frames of a square sprite.
More examples of such sprite sheets can be found in the path below

base\environment\decoration\advertising\digital\textures\animated\textures

It's recommended that you use free tools like Ezgif.com to make .gif and convert it into a sprite sheet for AdTexture

There are many screen shaders, this one is used for small TV screens.

If used cleverly with a properly done mesh, you can make use of this shader to put animation on your clothing or other items

Material properties

How materials work, and how you can configure them

Summary

Last documented update: Apr 20 2024 by

This page gives an explanation and overview about material properties. For more detailed explanation of a specific kind of material, please check the nested pages in the wiki's file tree, or check the "next" link at the bottom of the page.

If you want to see a list of materials grouped by class, check Cheat sheet: Materials
If you want to learn how material assignments work on the object, check 3d objects: .mesh files
If you want to understand reusable material templates, please check Re-using materials: .mi
The Modding Guides section has multiple guides on editing materials, e.g. Changing materials, colors and textures or AMM: Textured items and Cyberpunk Materials using Custom Props

Material properties

The properties of a material (or a shader) are defined in its shader file. Those files have the extension .mt or .remt and are widely used and extended.

You should never replace a .mt or .remt — this will affect every single thing using the material. If you want to change specific surfaces, look out for the right .mi file and change that, or create one and start custompathing.

Checking material properties

You can find a wiki page with an overview of shaders under Shader Docs, but it needs expanding. Maybe you'd like to contribute?

You can see a material's default properties by opening the .(re)mt file in WolvenKit and inspecting the parameters array.

To find a shader template, use the (you can copy the query):

yourMaterialType > .remt|.mt

Any properties that you don't overwrite by adding them to your CMaterialInstance or .mi file will take the default properties specified in the file.

Here, you can also see what value a shader template will use if you don't give it any properties.

What do these mean?

The interesting bit is on the right side of the arrow in the picture above, since it specifies the type of parameter:

Transparency

Whether or not a material can be transparent depends on the shader. Transparency can be switched on/off via the EnableMask property, or clamped via AlphaThreshold (see #shared-properties).

Glow / Light

Whether or not a material emits light depends on the shader, e.g. metal_base.remt supports this via the Emissive texture property. For a documentation of this, see Emissive Material Properties.

Shared properties

This section will list properties that are common to many materials and give a short explanation of what they do.

Not all materials use all of these properties.

The same parameters can be named differently across different shaders (e.g the base texture can be called BaseColor, Diffuse, or Albedo).

Properties with texture paths can end in Texture, e.g. BaseColorTexture instead of BaseColor.

As this is a horrible mess, it is easiest to look up the properties in the shader if you're not certain.

Roughness/Metalness

Transparent material properties

Summary

Created: Jan 14 2024 by Last documented update: Jan 14 2024 by

This page documents glass shaders and their properties.

For an overview of glass shaders, see Cheat sheet: Materials-> #glass
For an explanation of material properties and further links, see Material properties

To turn on material transparency, the EnableMask property must be set to True!

Glass

Cyberpunk's glass material, such as base\materials\glass_onesided.mt

All glass materials can consider the vertex color attribute, which you can edit directly in Blender.

Find a ready-to-use bottle glass .mi here.

Non-warping glass

For a glass material without view distortion and warping, use base\vehicles\common\materials\glass_windshield_tinted_black.mi

Find a ready-to use glass .mi file here

Half-transparent glass

base\environment\decoration\electronics\devices\device_neokitsch\textures\device_neokitsch_glass_black.mi

Device screen glass

base\fx\shaders\parallaxscreen.mt

Find a ready-to-use example of a turned-off screen here.

Note: tinting glass

There are a number of ways you can colorize your glass. GlassTint is the texture used to determine glass color. TintColor is procedural color. TintFromVertexPaint value determines how much vertex color affects the glass color. GlassTint seemingly has the highest priority, as in it will override other color parameters. Below is a test result from the process of making a glass wing.

Example materials

Transparent plastic

Download the .mi file here

See-through cloth

You can see the material in action on mana's Barong Tagalog mod, or download the .mi file from the resource repository

Emissive Material Properties

Properties of emissive (glowing) materials: Let There Be Light

Summary

Created: Jan 14 2024 by Last documented update: Jan 14 2024 by

This page documents glass shaders and their properties.

For an overview of emissive shaders, see ->
For an explanation of material properties and further links, see

Emissive Material

metal_base.remt

You can make engine\materials\metal_base.remt glow by adding the correct parameters, or you can poke through the game files and search for emissive > .mi to find Cyberpunk material templates to learn from.

For a list of such templates, check

Find a ready-to-use glowing .mi file .

device_diode.mt

You can find the shader under base/fx/shaders/device_diode.mt

The properties need to be documented at some point

Multilayered Material Properties

Properties of the multilayered material

Summary

Created: Jan 14 2024 by manavortex Last documented update: Jan 14 2024 by manavortex

This page documents multilayered shader properties.

For an overview of glass shaders, see Cheat sheet: Materials-> #multilayered
For an explanation of material properties and further links, see Material properties

If a layer with a greyscale mask is invisible, set MicroblendContrast in the .mlsetup to 1!

Multilayered Material

For a full documentation, check the corresponding page.

To set it up, use these keys for the "values" array of your material:

Textured (PBR) material properties

Properties of textured (PBR) materials

Summary

Created: Jan 14 2024 by Last documented update: Feb 20 2024 by

This page documents textured (PBR) shaders and their properties.

For an overview of PBR shaders, see ->
For an explanation of material properties and further links, see

The most commonly used material for anything textured is engine\materials\metal_base.remt. Despite its name, this material isn't necessarily metallic.

To use this material as emissive (light), check

You can change the colour of a texture on-the-fly by using the BaseColor property (color picker blend file )

The material can be transparent by setting enableMask to True (and make sure its not overriden in the ). When set, the material will use the alpha channel of the BaseColor.

To make your mesh load a texture, use the following CKeyValuePairs in your material's "values" array:

The .xbm is a container around the texture. Export the xbm to png via WolvenKit.

If your texture has any brightness issues in-game, toggle around the isGamma flag during import.

The expected isGamma settings are:

normals: false diffuse/albedo: true anything that is used in .inkatlas files: true

Plastic

The most commonly used material for anything textured is engine\materials\metal_base.remt. Despite its name, this material isn't necessarily metallic.

To turn the material into plastic, use the following CKeyValuePairs in your material's "values" array:

Further properties

Liquid material properties

Summary

Created: Jan 14 2024 by Last documented update: Jan 14 2024 by

This page documents liquid shaders and their properties.

For an explanation of material properties and further links, see

Liquid

Cyberpunk has its own liquid shader(s) such as base\materials\fillable_fluid_vertex.mt. Projecting this material onto a submesh will turn the submesh into a transparent container filled with the liquid you specified. If you flip the container on its head, the fluid will drain to the bottom and fill it up again.

To control the offsets, you need to adjust the vectors FluidBoundingBoxMax and FluidBoundingBoxMin.

It shares various properties (such as IOR, FresnelBias, BlurRadius) with the .

Find a ready-to use (black) liquid .mi file .

Spline material properties (Monowire)

Materials for colouring splines (e.g. monowire)

Summary

Created: Oct 19 2024 by manavortex Last documented update: Oct 19 2024 by manavortex

Based on research by Aanderz and wizard bakery

This page documents monowire materials and their properties.

The monowire's wire is a spline, not a regular mesh. It will appear invisible in 3d preview and behave in interesting ways if you put any different shader on it than the intended one. Please fuck around, find out, and then document your results!

Monowire Material

base\fx_shaders\nanowire_string_spline_deformed.mt

FX Material Properties

Animated materials and their properties

For a list of effect materials, check ->

metal_base_glitter

This shader glimmers

base\fx\_shaders\metal_base_glitter.mt

holo_mask

base\fx\_shaders\holo_mask.mt

hologram

base\fx\_shaders\hologram.mt

oda_helm

base\fx_shaders\oda_helm.mt

Lightning

You can find a mesh-as-effect as component inside base\characters\cyberware\player\a0_003__mantisblade\appearances\a0_003_wa__mantisblades_edge.app

Multilayered Material: Properties

Documentation of properties, with screenshots if applicable

Material properties

colorScale

Sets a color from within the mltemplate file. Hex codes corresponds to rows and columns in substance painter.

material

Depot path to the base material mltemplate from which the surface inherits its properties (lightbreaking, subsurface scattering…).

Example values: base\surfaces\materials\paint\car_paint\car_paint_metallic_01.mltemplate base\surfaces\materials\metal\enameled_hq\enameled_hq_01_30.mltemplate

matTile

Scaling (tiling multiplier) of the material across the mesh. The higher the value, the smaller it is.

metalLevelsIn

Clamps metalness input levels. This value corresponds to a (generated?) greyscale texture across the entire mesh.

metalLevelsOut

Clamps metalness output levels. This value corresponds to a (generated?) greyscale texture across the entire mesh.

normalStrength

Applies or ignores the base mesh's normal map to this layer. This value can be greater than 1!

offsetU

For logos: X-offset on the texture. Used for e.g. targeting a certain label.

offsetV

For logos: Y-offset on the texture. Used for e.g. targeting a certain label.

opacity

Transparency of the layer, 0 means that it isn't displayed, 1 means that it's fully visible.

roughLevelsIn

TODO

roughLevelsOut

Determines the roughness of a material

Microblend properties

You can only use microblends if this layer's mask is not fully white.

mbTile

Like #mattile, this determines the scaling of the microblend. The higher the value, the smaller it is.

microblend

Depot path to the base microblend texture (xbm), a seamless pattern which will be projected on the surface. Think of an extra normal map that tiles across a layer.

microblendContrast

A crossfade between the layer mask and the microblend mask (the black parts of the microblend texture). If you set this to >=1, then the layer will be blocked out where the microblend texture is black.

This requires the xbm's AlphaChannel (transparency) to be set up.

microblendNormalStrength

Like #normalstrength for the microblend.

microblendOffsetU

X-offset for the microblend texture.

microblendOffsetV

Y-offset for the microblend texture

Hair and skin material properties

Hair and skin shader

Summary

Published: Apr 05 2024 by manavortex Last documented edit: Apr 05 2024 by manavortex

This page gives an explanation of properties for the hair and skin shaders.

Wait, that's not what I want!

You can look up different hairstyles and -colours under Cheat Sheet: Hair
You can look up information about skin under Cheat Sheet: Body and Cheat Sheet: Head
Or you can learn more about Creating Custom Skins - Tattoos - Scars Textures
Or you can learn how to make a custom hair profile with the Wolvenkit Blender IO Suite

Hair material

Skin material

Fig. 1 - Microdetail _n.xbm

Multilayered: Previews

Collect preview pictures for multilayered materials here

3D Rendered Previews

@jato on the has created 3D rendered previews as .jpeg files of all the .mlsetups in the game. Original post can be found . The following list has been generated from these previews. A .zip is also on this Wiki.

More accurate previews rendered in-game (check ) can be created with the .

aluminium_annodised

aluminium_bare_01_300

aluminium_brushed_01_300

aluminium_old_01_300

aluminium_polished_01_300

aluminium_rolled_annodised

aluminium_rolled_bare_01_300

aluminium_rolled_rough_01_300

aluminium_rough_01_300

asphalt_old_01_300

asphalt_old_fractured_01_300

asphalt_old_patches_01_300

asphalt_paint_01_300

asphalt_road_01_300

asphalt_road_damaged_01_300

asphalt_road_new_01_300

asphalt_road_old_01_300

asphalt_tires_01_300

blood_smooth_1_30

brass_bare_01_300

brass_brushed_01_300

brass_old_01_300

brass_polished_01_300

brass_rolled_bare_01_300

brass_rolled_rough_01_300

brass_rough_01_300

bricks_old_damaged_01_200

bricks_old_painted_01_200

bricks_old_rough_01_200

bronze_bare_01_300

bronze_old_01_300

bronze_polished_01_300

bronze_roof_tile_bare_01_300

bronze_rough_01_300

canvas_clean_01_30

car_paint_metallic_01

carbon_fiber_01_30

carpet_office_felt_clean_01_300

carpet_ribbed_clean_01_300

carpet_thick_clean_01_300

carpet_underlay_old_01_300

ceramic_6x6_01_300

ceramic_6x6_damaged_01_300

ceramic_6x12_01_300

ceramic_6x12_damaged_01_300

ceramic_16x16_01_300

ceramic_16x16_01_metal_300

ceramic_16x16_dirty_01_300

Assorted Misc

ToDo: These need to be grouped (one picture per type), and then they need to be linked with nice headers. But I'd rather put them on here before they rot away on my disk for a few more months

fabric materials

bronze_roof_tile_bare

roughness and colour

Silver

material variants

Metals: rolled

Plastic

Plastic Tech HQ

Blending materials for more gooder colours

The Problem

The selection of materials and the available colours for each material in Cyberpunk 2077 is very limited and often underwhelming. The colours the game offers by default lack saturation and are usually either too light or too dark. The way of getting around this is layering different materials of different colours at varying opacity.

The Preparation

The Tools

- setup instructions
- setup instructions , from here on out referred to as MLSB
- setup instructions
(or another image editor of your choice if you need to edit an .mlmask)
(if you want to create an .mlmask from scratch)

For this to work properly, you need two layers inside the .mlmask, each of which needs to cover the same part of your .mesh you want to change. The lower layer needs to be pure white, the other one on top of that at 50% grey (rgb(50%,50%,50%)). This way, the materials of each layer will blend into each other allowing much greater control over shade, brightness, saturation, and shininess.

If your blue denim lacks saturation, slap a second layer on top of it. Give that second layer the same material and colour and both will amplify each other.

The default .mlmask found inside your .mesh might already contain the layers described above. If not, you'll likely get away with editing the layers in Photoshop. To learn more about .mlmask files go and to learn how to create one yourself using Blender, go .

The Colour

For a specific example, we'll try to get yellow to look nice as I find yellow to be one of the more finicky colours to get to look "correct" within Cyberpunks shader. Here, I'm using velvet_clean_01_30 with rgb(77%,22%,8%) as the base and latex_neon_01_30 with rgb(100%,100%,0%) on top of it. By itself,velvet_clean_01_30 lacks saturation and its selection of yellows is very limited. latex_neon_01_30 on the other hand includes a pretty decent shade of yellow, but also lacks saturation—even though the name implies the opposite. I find that Cyberpunks shader often renders yellows to be more green than I'd expect them to be. Which is why I'm using an orange base layer.

The Texture

This method of layering materials unfortunately drastically reduces the effect of the normals of each material. normals become "filled in" the more of them you stack. A workaround is to mis-appropriate a materials normals as a microblend for another material.

Copy the path of the .mltemplate of a material whose texture you want to use from MLSB.
Paste the path into WolvenKits Asset Browser and hit Enter to search.
Right click on the .mltemplate and select "Open without adding to project".
Copy the DepotPath of the normalTexture and paste it into the µblends field in MLSB.
In the µblends Parameters box, you can mess around with its size (Tiles, higher number means smaller texture—it gets tiled more often across the same surface area), opacity (contrast) and intensity (normals, can be higher than 1).

normals of µblends can also be inverted by setting their intensity to a negative number. this will, for example, turn a relief from pointing outwards to pointing inwards. This is sometimes necessary when using the normals from an mltemplate as a µblend, but creative choice takes precendence, of course.

The Opacity

Cyberpunk allows layers in your mlsetup to exceed Opacity 1.0. What this does is amplify your current layer. This is very useful for camouflage materials such as denim_camo_01_30. This material looks faint and lacks saturation by default. This can be mitigated by setting the Opacity to 3.0. For denim_camo_01_30 I'd also recommend using olive green as the base colour for your camo layer in the mlsetup.

The Shininess

If you want your material to be matte, pick a value where the two numbers are roughly equal. For velvet_clean_01_30 this would be 0.502,0.498. This might end up looking a bit flat though. An alternative with more depth would be 0.1569,0.8431.

If you want your material to be very shiny, pick a value where the first number is low, and the second is zero.

Confusingly, the opposite might be true, as well. In the following example, 0.6667,0.3333 is shinier than 0.3333,0.6667. It's quite illustrative of the interaction between the two numbers because they're the exact opposites.

The Versatility

Most of my mlsetups bascially exclusively contain layers of velvet_clean_01_30 or a similar cloth material with different µblends. Exceptions are latex_neon_01_30 for anything yellow as described above, and any metals. Although you can colourise those with an additional layer of velvet_clean_01_30.

The Outro

If you create your own material combinations, expect a lot of trial and error and bring a lot of patience.

The Addendum

Enter Photo Mode, Alt + Tab over to MLSB, and make some changes.
Export the .json and import the .mlsetup in WolvenKit. Click on "Hot Reload" in the toolbar.
Switch back to the game and, while still in Photo Mode, switch to your saved outfit.
Your changes should show up on your item. Switch back to no outfit again, make more changes in MLSB, export, import, Hot Reload, rinse and repeat.

Materials: troubleshooting

Troubleshooting guide for materials.

My material ignores transparency!

If you have , then something in the mesh got borked. Easiest way to fix:

Export your mesh
Re-name it to act as a backup
Replace it with something where transparency definitely works
Import over that mesh
Copy-paste the material setup from the original mesh

My material is black and shiny!

That happens when one of the depotPaths can't be resolved. Double-check your values — can help you with this.

All paths are okay, it's still broken

It's possible that you have a texture ref inside an object that expects mlsetups or mlmasks, or vice versa. File validation can't test for this, so you'll have to do it by hand.

Make sure to have the correct kind of cKeyValuePair for your kind of material.

My material isn't showing at all!

Test if it is the material, or if your mistake is somewhere else. Replace your material's basePath with something that you'll definitely recognize, such as base\environment\decoration\containers\cases\coffin\textures\m_z_gold.mi.

If the gold material shows up and your custom material doesn't, then you have an issue with the material.

Cyberpunk Shaders in Blender

Summary

Published: Jan 20 2024 by Last documented update: Mar 26 2024 by

This page will teach you how to get Cyberpunk materials into Blender (and how to bake them into textures).

Wait, this is not what I want!

If this is your first time in Blender, check out

How to get Cyberpunk Shaders into Blender?

Most Cyberpunk shaders are procedurally generated from and . As such, there aren't any textures that you can import.

So how is everyone doing it?

This is where the comes in:

On , Wolvenkit creates a .material.json file containing the .mesh file's in a machine-readable form.
When into Blender, the plugin reads this file and automatically generates a list of materials. After selecting a mesh, you can see all available options in the Materials tab:

Blender: Changing the appearance

To change the assigned material, complete the following steps:

Select a mesh in Object mode
Switch to Edit Mode (hotkey: Tab)
Select all vertices (hotkey: A)
In the list on the material tab, select the appearance that you want to display
Under the list, click "Apply"
Be sure to select "Material Preview" as the Viewport Shading Method (see the screenshot below)

Blender: Baking Cyberpunk Shaders

Video guide

Troubleshooting: I can't import my materials!

UV Mapping: texturing a 3d object

What is UV mapping and how does it work?

Summary

Published: Jan 21 2024 by Last documented update: Jan 21 2024 by

This page contains the theory of how to connect meshes (3d objects) with textures (which are 2d after all)

Wait, this isn't what I want!

For a hands-on guide to UV mapping, check ->
For import/export help, check

What is "UV mapping" and can I eat it?

This is the technical term for the process of mapping a flat texture on your three-dimensional object. The most hands-on example for this is Christmas chocolate:

Regardless of that, you can not eat it.

Where can I see them?

To look at an object's UV mapping, you'll have to fire up Blender (or a 3d editing software of your choice).

An object's UV maps are visible in the Data tab:

How do I edit the UV mapping?

To look at an object's UV mapping, you'll have to fire up Blender (or a 3d editing software of your choice).

Open the UV editing perspective, select a mesh, and switch to Edit Mode. If you select vertices in the viewport on the right, you can see their UV islands in the UV editor on the left:

Recommended AddOns

If you work with UV mappings, you should definitely check out MioUV. It automates a bunch of things that used to take the better part of an afternoon: